


Arkham Asylum, Clark Kent, and Other Metaphors for an Identity Crisis

by action-cat (clytemnestras)



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, M/M, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 20:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3182945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/action-cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unhappy scene queens through basements, college and hospital beds, an epic</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arkham Asylum, Clark Kent, and Other Metaphors for an Identity Crisis

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: referenced suicide attempts and self harm, canonical depression & mental illness (bipolar) and time spent in a mental health unit (for the main bulk of the story) as well as alcohol abuse and Pete generally having dangerous outlook on life. 
> 
> I promise it ends in a brighter place than it starts.

He may never tell him why - why the first time Pete sees him across the ward is the first time Pete has ever been too scared to talk to him.

 

**

The beginning wasn’t special like people like to make out, more like two people stuck in concentric circles but never really crossing paths. There were the kids, and the queens, and there was them, the scene in it’s most violent, purest form.

 

Those two names whispered between parties and pits but never sharing the same two breaths.

 

It’s funny, because Gabe says they met once before, claims they smashed into each other in some pit, the night some asshole split his lip. A claim of love at first hit - scarring faces like hearts in other lives entirely. It’s more funny, because Gerard says Gabe’s full of shit.

 

Pete still stands by his original theory though. Pete Wentz first saw Mikey Way three years too late, legs swinging in the back of a van on the first gig of the semester, stealing a beer from the cooler and drinking it alone. He saw him over the head of some scene girl wrapped around Pete's lips and his thighs asking him to whisper poems in her ear.

 

He can’t remember her name but he remembers Mikey’s flatironed hair, striped jeans and cocky wink.

 

That probably means less in the real world than it does inside his.

 

**

 

The first night in the ward, they don’t try and talk to each other.

 

No, that’s a lie.

 

Pete doesn’t try to talk to Mikey, and Mikey stares out at the rain and curls up in his brother’s hoodie - it’s two sizes too big and too ripped and paint splattered to be his, anyway - and pointedly doesn’t notice anything about the room or world around him. Pete can smell the faint sting of vodka on the sweater from the other side of the room, if he concentrates.

 

Which he does, and then doesn’t, in small doses.

 

When they lead him away for the first of his soon to be daily tea-and-psychopathy meetings, Pete certainly doesn’t watch for Mikey’s acknowledgement. That would be masochistic.

 

**

 

There were lots of parties gasping for his attention on campus - like his name was some kind of blessing on their credibility. Did you see Pete, there, at her last party? and He started the pit, got the whole thing going and a million other testaments to _Pete Fucking Wentz, Man,_ Lord and Saviour of the dying scene.

 

He craved it, despised it, revelled in his glorification. Drank his legs away and kissed his lips apart and sold his hips to the highest bidder, demanded back for all his fame.

 

And Mikey - just as craved, maybe moreso - just drank and danced and sold his fucks to the basement floors.His apathy was a shining light in the dark and Pete hated his fucking guts.

 

He lost his feet in the swell of the music, swayed and moved and fell into the crush of bodies the way he always wanted to stay lost - Fuck you Peter, Fuck you Tink, Neverland never wanted you anyway - when Mikey first put his hands on his hips and directed their motion.

 

That should have been the moment, probably. Slotted together, feeling Mikey holding him back from himself and swinging them both to the tinny beats from the system in the corner. He threw his head back and let himself be lead and it sort of made sense. There was whiskey on Mikey’s breath and his eyes were unfocused and his whole body was focused on Pete’s. Apathy was an ill-fitting mask. As their bodies juddered with the crowd he felt that pull, again, that incubus drag towards Mikey and his too-tight jeans and plastic glasses covering sad eyes.

 

If Pete craved the crowds, Mikey fed on them and then purged himself in the club bathrooms.

 

He was a dime-store poet failing English to pass Social Studies In Lonely Adolescence. Mikey was just coasting the wave.

 

When the crowd pushed them apart they never seemed to float back.

 

**

 

He figures the stint in the hospital won’t last as long as last time. He has a shiny new diagnosis, spiralled from the barrel-scraping depression to full blown bipolar type ii and whatever extra shots of crazies that entitles him to milk, sure, but he knows how they tick this time around.

 

Just a week or two to learn the right smiles, take the right pills, answer the right things to every trick question. It's an easy dance if you know the right steps, and he's slowly growing out of his two left feet.

 

He checked himself in, this time, shaking on the floor of the dorm to shaking in the arms of the nurses. No one had to find him passed out in the lot, pills spilling like rain on the floor of his car.

 

He'd check his texts if they hadn't locked up his phone. It's nice to not be sure that Patrick still won't (can'tcan't _can't_ ) speak to him.

 

Mikey's under the blankets on the couch when the nurses walk him back in.

 

Pete's pretty sure no one has ever slept in this room.

 

He let's them lead him straight to his bedroom.

 

**

 

The rumours spilled out like cresting waves over the student population. About Alicia, and the two of them, and all three's monster teeth.

 

Where the poets had hissed "cheating slut" and barked when she crossed campus, she gave more black eyes than they could count to, collectively.

 

Where the punks had called Mikey an asshole for sliding into their relationship and luring her away, he destroyed all of their credibility with a cocked eyebrow and a slanted whisper in the right person's ear.

 

The scene kids, though. They were Pete's favourite. That was neutral ground for them all, home for their dirty and their private and their truth. The scene kids had speculated it was all some game, Alicia passing kisses like a go-between for the boy's hush-hush love affair. A romance lived in roleplay and one-third-empty threesome attempts.

 

None of it was right, or true, obviously. But the last one had the better story in it.

 

Call it mythology - it doesn't have to be a lie.

 

**

 

Waking up in the hospital bed isn’t exactly a surprise, except how it is, because it’s the first time he’s slept in a month. That’s a sign of something, probably.

 

Mikey is sat in the cafeteria, making faces at his oatmeal and continuing to refuse to the hospital backdrop enter his consciousness. His table is the farthest from the door and from the other patrons. Isolation looks sick on him, and Pete feels kind of ill just looking at it.

 

Legends of the fall, the two of them, now with no hands to hold them up in place.

 

Pete lets the nurse butter his toast for him without cracking a single joke about exterior damage. Even in his head, they fall flat. He’ll probably worry about his artistic integrity later, when he isn’t counting his footsteps towards Mikey’s table.

 

He pulls the sleeves of his hoodie over his hands when he sits down, shoves the toast away and just stares pointedly at where hazel eyes won’t meet his.

 

Mikey raises an eyebrow without so much as flickering his gaze from the white goop in his bowl. “Welcome to the fortress of solitude. I’m Clark fucking Kent.”

 

Pete snorts and holds out a hand. “Nice to meet you Clark. I’m Harley Quinn. My Muffin’ll be here any minute now to break me out of this place, I’m sure.”

 

When Mikey does look at him, his mouth is drawn tight like he’s ready to punch Pete in the jaw and his eyes are smiling. He takes Pete’s hand.

 

He’s gonna take that one as a victory.

 

**

 

He worked out there was a problem when for the third night in a row he woke up on the floor of someone else’s dorm with little memory of a) the night before and b) the location of his pants.

 

He wasn’t hungover because he was still drunk. He was miserable, because the parties never really help. He was cuddling a bottle of Jack Daniels, and that was maybe the worst thing about the whole situation.

 

On the sofa just across the room, Mikey Way was slung half on top of some short kid, a bottle of vodka hanging between his fingers and the the floor. Pete’s jeans were laid over him in a makeshift blanket.

 

He had no idea what that meant.

 

He dragged them off the sleepy couple and tugged them on. Mikey blinked up at him blearily, glasses only covering one eye.

 

“Go back to sleep. This is all just a dream.”

 

Mikey smiled. “Get fucked.”

 

Pete looked around the room, filled with blank walls, broken bottles and bodies. It might have even been his dorm. He couldn’t actually tell. When he looked back down, Mikey was still smiling. “But that’s the thing, MikeyWay. I’m saving myself for you.”

 

When he stumbled back to his room there were three letters from his Literature Professor laid out on his un-slept in bed, worried about his grades, his attendance, his fucking sanity.

 

He had one semester before they kicked his worthless ass back to Chicago, _“failure”_ tattooed across his peace of mind and scratched into his back.

 

The next time he woke up with no pants, he saw them a few hours later, slung low on Mikey’s hips, and riding too high on his ankles.

 

He had even less idea what that meant.

 

**

 

Mikey’s head is in Pete’s lap when the nurses tell him Gerard is on the phone for him. He jumps up so fast that Pete almost steals a handful of his hair from where his fingers were tangled.

 

He takes his shitty “art therapy” project from his pocket while he waits, fixing up the shaky lines of the obscene sketch - himself posing dirtily in Harley Quinn’s tight spandex.

 

The ward buzzes by for seconds, minutes, hours, maybe. Machines and blue scrubs blurring away as Pete straddles the line between on edge and sated.

 

He grins up at Mikey when they lead him back, scoots up on the sofa to make room.

 

Tears drip onto the Petey Quinn sketch before he can shove it into his pocket again.

 

“Hey, man. Dumb question alert but you okay?”

 

Mikey doesn’t even look up, just folds his awkward limbs up until he fits into Pete, until he’s small and young and has all the worst of the world glittering in his eyes. He tugs the hood of Gerard’s sweater up and burrows into it, into Pete.

 

“He can’t - they won’t let him. Because the drinking. And the, uh. The near-miss, last year. He’s allowed to call, but.”

 

“It’s okay man, I got you.”

 

He - at least he thinks he does.

 

**

 

He walked in on Mikey and Gabe with their pants down in a club bathroom on the last day of the semester. It wasn’t the first time he’d walked in on either of them, clothes askew and mouths wet and some poor unbroken thing hanging off their waists.

 

But this was. Something.

 

Gabe’s head shot up, eyes wide and comical. He tried to cover himself in feigned modesty, and Mikey just smiled the same way he did that first night - knowing and uncaring.

 

But Pete had an adrenaline high and was drunk on a D-mark pass as much as he was vodka. He looked at the lavender boxers around Gabe’s ankles and his jeans swinging around Mikey’s knees and stumbled back outside into the flashing and sweating and forgettable crowds.

 

He blinked over and over and the image never quite left the back of his eyelids. His friends. His, uh, whatever. Swollen lips and smiles like dares. Mikey’s hands curled around Gabe’s hips, Gabe’s neck red and bitten. Pete’s jeans, _Pete’s jeans_ framing Mikey’s awkward knees.

 

He got lost in the dancers, dizzy and confused and out of rhythm. Travie caught him in the centre of the floor, gnawing at his lip lower lip with worry. Pete didn’t stop moving until Travie pulled him to the side, checking his pupils, checking his breath, and Pete pressed their bodies together. He pressed Travie into the wall and pulled him down into a vicious kiss.

 

Travie never humoured him. Travie never let Pete’s shit fuck him over, didn’t open his mouth to the kiss or relax into Pete. He waited for it to be done then shoved Pete in a cab home.

 

He didn’t quite remember actually getting back there.

 

**

 

When the nurses tell them free time is over and they get taken back to their rooms, he pushes his drawing into Mikey’s pocket.

 

It’s stupid, really fucking stupid. But at no point has Pete ever been smart around Mikey and he’s got no real reason to start.

 

He gets into bed when he gets there. Looks up at the grey walled room and the foot long windows that only open inwardly and the tiny bathroom cleansed of any sharp little objects, any dark little things that could make the night easier.

 

Not that he -

 

That’s a fucking lie.

 

He stares at the ceiling until the sun creeps through the slitted windows, then turns on his side and waits for the nurse to call him out for breakfast.

 

The first thing he notices when he reaches the cafeteria is that Mikey isn’t there.

 

It’s also possibly the last thing he notices.

 

**

 

When Mikey went back to Jersey in the summer, half the scene went with him.

 

The parties crashed and Pete crashed and he didn’t even put two and two together.

 

Drinking in his dorm, alone, when no one knew he was there, it didn’t change him waking up drunk the next morning.

 

After a while he forgot there was any change at all.

 

**

 

He finds Mikey pressed against the window, again. Staring out at the rain, wrapped up in Gerard’s sweater and the blanket from the couch and still shivering.

 

Pete can’t. Not like the first night, watching silently from the other side of the room.

 

He doesn’t plan on wrapping his arms around Mikey and tugging him back onto the couch. It happens, anyway.

 

“It’s supposed to be better, in here, right? It’s not supposed to be worse.” Mikey tugs of his glasses and buries his face in Pete’s chest and this is nothing he’s emotionally equipped for, not when he’s such a fuck up himself.

 

“I don’t think it’s better unless you want it to be.” Pete doesn’t know what the fuck that’s meant to mean. Like anyone would voluntarily let themselves tear off their skin and cut up their insides and destroy everything they want to be good for.

 

Mikey looks up at him through wet lashes, eyes swimming. “I don’t think I want to be at all.”

 

Pete kisses his forehead and doesn’t say a word.

 

**

 

He didn’t think that summer actually ended.

 

It dragged by in a hungover haze until he was throwing up blood in someone else’s bathtub and the phone in his hand hissed _what’s your emergency_ at him and just like that it was all over.

 

Pete told the ambulance where to pick him up.

 

**

Gerard calls twice that day. Mikey cries both times and wipes the tears away on Pete’s shoulder and Pete’s never been more scared that he might just be fucking this up beyond salvation.

 

His parents don’t call at all.

 

Gabe leaves a message with the nurse and she looks too ill to repeat it.

 

He knows before the doctor pulls him away that he’ll be allowed to check out in the morning. He doesn’t say anything to Mikey, not about leaving.

 

He may whisper _“I love you”_ into his hair, but he’s not entirely sure.

 

**

 

When morning comes he doesn’t bother to pack his things.

 

He walks into the cafeteria and grabs Mikey by the shoulders and kisses him until the world stops and starts again.

 

“Remember me, Kal El. When you come back home.”

 

Mikey flinches away then scowls. “You - you bastard. Fucking. No.” He raises his hand and Pete can’t be sure if he’s about to punch him or hide his own face so he leans forward and kisses Mikey again. Kisses him until the nurses pull him off, eyes rolling and unimpressed scowls making hard lines across their faces.

 

“Harley Quinn is totally gay, dude.” He hears laughter behind him when they start handing back his things, one by one, slid over the nurse’s counter.

 

“Yeah well, so am I.”


End file.
